


All You've Ever Dreamed Of

by Frayach



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dreams, HP: Epilogue Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frayach/pseuds/Frayach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Be careful what you wish for.  You just might get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You've Ever Dreamed Of

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my oldest fics newly scrubbed & polished thanks to P.D.

Harry has everything he thought he would ever want.

He has a comfortable townhouse in a part of the city where the ivy-covered trees are so sprawling that their branches scrape the windows when it’s stormy. When he walks the dog at night, he often passes his neighbours walking their dogs, and sometimes in a fit of camaraderie or loneliness (he can’t always tell the difference), he feels the urge to ask them whether their homes, too, feel haunted – all that scratching and tapping when the wind blows at night. All those bedrooms up and down the street full of men and women lying on their backs, watching the shifting pattern of moonlight and branches on the ceiling and remembering all the people they’ve lost in their lives. And all the people who’d never been theirs to lose in the first place.

He has a smart, kind, attentive spouse. Even after all these years, she still knocks on the bathroom door before entering. With good reason, she trusts him completely and never asks questions when he sometimes doesn’t come home until after supper. When they talk, their conversation is easy and interesting. She has many friends and many hobbies that keep her busy. She always asks how his day went, and he always asks with genuine curiosity about hers as well. They seldom make love anymore, but when he hears about his friends’ marriages – the rows, the brooding silences, the long and costly divorces – he thinks it’s a small price to pay for contentment. And it’s not as though Ginny repulses him. It’s just that her naked body stepping out of the shower in the morning doesn’t move him. He wishes it did. After all, she’s lovely in a boyish way. But it just doesn’t, and whenever he sees her without her clothes on, he turns away embarrassed. For both of them.

He has a job that is never boring, that keeps his mind busy from the moment he opens his office door every morning to the moment he closes it behind him in the evening. He steps into the echoing corridors where the only sound that late in the day is the swishing of the charmed mops. He walks carefully around the runnels of water that collect in places where over the years countless feet have worn grooves into the marble floor. Outside, the other office buildings have long ago disgorged their inhabitants into the streets where they’d been whisked away by cars and buses and Portkeys. The setting sun falls on random things as it slices down the streets between tall buildings like a knife cutting a cake. Depending on the hour or season, it may fall on the fluting of a pillar or a bunch of over-flowing bins or, sometimes, a single stunted tree, its stubborn roots mounding the sidewalk encroaching on it from every side.

He has three carefree children, two of whom look so much like his pretty wife that he wonders if they inherited any of his genes at all. The least carefree, however, looks like him, and that combination – his resemblance to Harry and the un-childlike worry in his eyes – sometimes makes Harry feel guilty, but for what precisely he can’t say. All three of his children are enrolled at Hogwarts, and all of them are, by any measure, doing well. Their Owls are full of fleeting triumphs and even more fleeting defeats. They’ve always been good and dutiful children, and if Harry ever feels oddly distant from them – well, he’s always known it’s his fault and not theirs. He loves them, but that love feels strangely impersonal, and sometimes he wonders if, perhaps, he’d been damaged irreparably by his own lonely childhood. Or perhaps he’s merely selfish. That would hardly be an impossibility.

Yet despite all these gifts, Harry finds himself dreaming every night of far-away cities he’s never visited. In one dream, he watches from a high window as the sun rises out of a broad, sluggish river to bathe the city’s rooftops in gold. He remembers those rooftops more vividly than he remembers most things from his waking life. Some of the rooftops are decrepit – flat and black with tar, while others are steeply peaked with grey slate that reflects the sun like water or ice. Some have metal chimneys, bent and cobbled together from bits and scraps of piping. Others, usually the pitched and slated ones, have massive chimneys made of stone, and the smoke that rises from them flows with a purpose that suggest inhabitants with important and busy lives. In his dream, Harry doesn’t know if the roof above him is gabled or flat. He doesn’t know whether the chimney is made of stone or rusted pipe. He doesn’t even know if his life is among those that are busy and important. All he knows is that somewhere, in the slowly brightening shadows behind him, is a narrow bed with tangled sheets where Draco Malfoy lies sleeping, one hand resting on the pillow beside his face, his fingers slightly curled.

Harry has no idea why he dreams of these strange cities. Nor why, when he does, he can always sense Malfoy there with him. After all, Harry has never seen Malfoy asleep before. He has never seen him leaning on the wrought-iron railing of a bridge, gazing down into the glowing furnace of a Soviet-era barge as it churns up-river, chugging its way through the shadows beneath a massive concrete arch. He has never seen Malfoy stand, one hand clasping his wrist behind his back, before a painting of soldiers during the Spanish Civil War. He has never seen Malfoy sitting on the stone sill of an open window with one long leg stretching to the floor and the other braced against the frame opposite him as he absently twirls a stalk of lavender between his fingers. He has never seen Malfoy turn to smile at him or trace a fingertip around the lip of his wine glass or throw a Galleon into an ornamental pool where koi swim like half-forgotten dreams of summer amidst the decaying gold of the November leaves floating on its surface. And he knows for certain that he has never seen the moon reflect off the slick sheen of sweat on Malfoy’s bare chest as he arches off the bed when Harry’s fingers graze the insides of his pale thighs.

Hell, he hasn’t even seen Malfoy since the time he watched Malfoy disappear into a crowd at Kings Cross on a bright autumn morning three years ago. And yet sometimes he sees that moment in his dreams as well. Except it’s never at Kings Cross that Malfoy turns and walks away; instead it’s Gare du Nord or Stesen Keretapi Kuala Lumpur or Berlin Ostbahnhof or Stazione Centrale di Milano. Harry knows because he remembers the signs, even when he finds himself forgetting what he and Ginny did Saturday last. He wishes he didn’t, but he does.

Harry doesn’t know what any of this means, and most days he’s afraid to find out. He’s not stupid, after all. He’s read Divination books and even Freud’s _The Interpretation of Dreams_. He knows about transference and time-slippage and the latent power of subconscious desire, which he’d heard described as like the forces beneath the surface of the earth that can crush bone to sand, and buckle roads like ribbons, and turn a primordial swamp into a fist-sized piece of coal – a vein of which, once ignited, can burn for a hundred years.

He’s not stupid. And he’s not a shirker. He’d shouldered obligations, after all. He’d made promises. He knows that one step to either side will send his quiet, comfortable world spinning like a tin top. He doesn’t even have to wonder if Malfoy feels the same way. He’s already asked. He already knows. Malfoy is simply waiting . . .

. . . waiting in Harry’s dreams for the moment when Harry cannot take it any longer; for the moment when something snaps inside him like the neck of a violin strung too tightly; for the moment when not breaking his wife’s and friends’ and children’s hearts becomes more unendurable than the thought of doing just that. Malfoy’s been waiting for a long time. Sometimes Harry wonders whether he’ll simply give up, and sometimes that thought gives him the strength to persevere another day, another week, another year. Other times, it’s too terrible to bear, and he finds himself curled around his stomach in the loo at work, in the shower in the morning, in his bed with his wife asleep beside him while he gasps for breath and prays for morning.

In the darkest moments of his rage-filled childhood, Malfoy couldn’t have dreamed up a worse form of torture than this. His simple waiting.

In his dream, Harry turns from the window, and for a moment his eyes are too dazzled by the new sun he’d been watching to see anything more than the low sloping ceiling and the long shadow of their narrow bed. But as his eyes adjust, he sees that Draco is awake. Awake and watching him.

_Must you go?_

Harry merely nods, feeling as though he’d been in this very moment a thousand times – an unreeling spool of celluloid, a lifetime of deja-vu, a dream he never quite wakes from.

Draco reaches for him, but already Harry hears the screech of his Muggle alarm clock. It’s faint at first – easy to mistake for the beeping of a lorry backing up in the alley below. But he knows it isn’t a lorry. It never is.

Rather it’s his life calling to him, calling him back, calling him away from his dream. It’s the sound of a thousand promises he made before he even knew what a promise was. Before he knew how hard they are to break, even when you want to, even when it’s all you ever dream of.

 

_fin_


End file.
